Beyond Nuclear International

Compensation scheme has aided very few people, as Saharan residents experience cancers, blindness and birth defects

By Johnny Magdaleno

Ahmed el-Hadj Hamadi was huddled into a building with the rest of his community by French soldiers early in the morning. They were instructed to lie down, close their eyes and cover their ears. He then remembers a sound like “the world coming to an end” and the windows turning white. A cord above their prone bodies swung erratically until the light bulb it held shattered.

“I thought it was the apocalypse. We all did,” he said. “We all thought we might die.” Later, the French military began tasking out labor to residents in the isolated desert region of Algeria. “They had built a kind of village at the explosion area, and even put animals in it,” Hamadi added. “After the blast we were sent out to gather all the rubbish. The ground was all burned, white, liquid.”

To nomadic communities around the town of Reggane, they’re known more than half a century later as “leopard skins” — stretches of sand across Algeria’s southern Sahara that are peppered with small black clumps. People used to collect scrap metal from the charred warplanes and trucks that emerge, fossil-like, and then smelt them into jewelry and kitchen utensils.

Tourists have been told it is safe to visit the Hoggar Mountains, site of underground French atomic tests. (Photo: Guillaume Lecoquierre, Creative Commons/Flickr)

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Welsh Labour sells out its citizens to let radioactive mud dumping continue

By Linda Pentz Gunter

On October 10, the Welsh Assembly had the opportunity to cast a vote that would have protected the health, wellbeing and livelihoods of the people of Wales. But instead, on that day, the Welsh Assembly members of the UK Labour Party marched into the Senedd with blinkers around their eyes and plugs in their ears.

They could have halted the colonialist and medically dangerous dumping of 320,000 tonnes of radioactive mud dredged from the English Hinkley C nuclear construction site that has been delivered daily (and sometimes by night; see headline photo) to the “Cardiff Grounds” disposal site less than two miles from the Welsh coast. (The first round of dumping has now ended but it is due to resume in January 2019.)

There have been several protests outside the Welsh Assembly against the dumping of radioactive mud into Cardiff Bay.

That mud has been inadequately tested for radioactive isotopes. Fishermen work those waters. The seas move mud back to land and into rivers and streams. The winds blow spray onto shore. It is beyond essential to have 100% certainty about what is in that mud. Everything is at stake here: health, jobs, wildlife, the marine environment.

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We need a cooperative movement of movements for peace

By David Krieger

Nuclear weapons, unique in their power and capacity for destruction, pose an existential threat to humanity. Their inability to discriminate between soldiers and civilians, diversion of resources from social necessities, and concentration of power within a small number of leaders in a small number of countries make them incompatible with a just and sustainable world.

Fortunately, the number of nuclear weapons that exist today (nearly 15,000 across nine nuclear-armed countries) is far fewer than the Cold War peak of 70,000. But it is still enough to destroy civilization several times over. The vast majority of these weapons are in the arsenals of the US and Russia, the two countries that have always led the nuclear arms race.

It is clear that the status quo is not working. The paradigms of arms control and non-proliferation that dominate international diplomacy assume the continued existence of nuclear weapons. However, the dangers inherent in nuclear weapons will remain whether there are tens of thousands or only a few. As long as they exist, they can be used, whether by malicious intent, miscalculation or careless accident.

A Brief History of the Nuclear Age

In 1945, the US shocked the world by becoming the first country to use the atomic bomb in war, killing tens of thousands of people in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The immense power of this most deadly of weapons set off an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the emergent superpowers of the postwar era. The threat of mutually assured destruction kept the use of these weapons in check. But in 1962, restraint was nearly abandoned. In a thirteen-day confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union after the Soviet placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba—known as the Cuban Missile Crisis—the outbreak of a World War III, now with nuclear weapons, became a very real possibility.

The dangers inherent in nuclear weapons will remain whether there are tens of thousands or only a few

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Annual dose of empirical data shows nuclear power in continued decline

By Linda Pentz Gunter

When arguing the case for or against nuclear energy, you can go with the masters of spin and omission or you can go with the empirical data. We prefer the latter. And for that, there is the welcome annual edition of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report.

After that, the job becomes easy. There IS no case for nuclear power. It’s fundamentally over. Yet governments — mainly those of nuclear weapons states — cling on to it even as their fingers are loosened one at a time from the ledge. They refuse to fall. Why?

These questions are largely answered in the 2018 edition of the WNISR which rolled out in London, UK on September 4, and is available for download — in full or as an executive summary — from the WNISR website. (The US rollout is October 9 in Washington, DC.)

The report each year contains a roadmap trajectory of the nuclear power industry’s fate worldwide. For some time now, that trajectory has pointed downwards. There may be the occasional slight bump upwards (mostly due to China) or plateau, but fundamentally over the long haul, nuclear power is in decline. 

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